


A Cabinet, Much Like A Gateway

by davefoley



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, F/F, Food, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 14:11:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20779889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/davefoley/pseuds/davefoley
Summary: Jadzia thinks about her while cleaning out her cabinet.





	A Cabinet, Much Like A Gateway

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't written in a while :D i did this to put off a short essay due in 2 days ... a short essay that needs less words than what i wrote here in 2 hours. kind of kringe. o well enjoy this could have been shorter i just wanted to see how much i could keep going before i felt like i was writing smth bigger than i wanted. i love kira...... love wanting to know more about how the cardassian occupation affected her on a traumatic and emotional level. we r all jadzia actually

“The mapa bread’s gone completely bad,” Jadzia says, grabbing the moldy and grungy little specimen out of the cabinet and putting it on the pile of other perished perishables that have been sitting humid in Kira’s stockpile. Her food stockpile. The habit she picked up during Cardassian occupation in order to make sure her, her family, her people, had something to keep on.

“Moldy mapa bread is still edible,” Kira pouts while puttering around in the other room with replacements for all the food going into the industrial waste reclamation unit. “Mostly. You eat around it.” Jadzia doesn’t answer except in the form of one perked brow towards the offending article she just threw away. She moves on, perturbed, and awkwardly fishes deeper into the cabinet and into the cabinet, there is an intensely ominous (opaque too — even more ominous) container at her fingertips. She hesitates, cringes, and then goes for it.

It’s red and doesn’t present itself with much of a smell, but Jadzia doesn’t deign to find out its contents — best wait for Kira to explain herself as she walks back into the room with a heaping bag of grain. It covers her relatively smaller body with ease.

“Oh!” Kira’s eyes light up from where she can see Jadzia on the ground, distressed, with a face mask, gloves, and apron for extra measure. Her eyes from where they peer over the mask know she looks undignified — but she sits poised as she usually is. She carries such an air of grace. “That’s the uh— it’s the leftovers from Captain Sisko’s dinner a month ago! Gumb— Gum... Jumba—”

“His father’s famed gumbo,” Jadzia answers, with a sigh knowing Kira has a perfectly good fridge unit to store these particular foodstuffs in. “It’s a real shame this has to be thrown away.” It’ll be another month before the shipment of Earth seafood Ben ordered will come in, and Ben doesn’t settle for Bajoran seafare yet when he makes his father’s recipes. The weeks of paprikash leading up to it will be delicious, but killer.

“Oh come on Jadzia! It’s still perfectly edible, open it up right now and I’ll heat it up— we’ll have it for dinner!” Kira has been scouting her storage for an empty place where the mold’s not gone onto the infrastructure and saddles the grain right up against it. She moves — more like darts, scampering on dirt ground like a desperate scavenger — silently to Jadzia as if an illegal exchange was happening between them, and attempts to grab the container before Jadzia takes it further out of her reach and plops it into the spoiled pile.

“Apologies if that container was a family heirloom.” Jadzia sheepishly jokes while Kira rolls her eyes in exasperation and stands back up, knowing she has more food to replace the old ones. “Kira, this is a serious question, but the food here rots in days, what is the point of storing it all in here anyway?”

“You never know when there’s a power outage,” Kira quickly answers. She’s taking inventory of what she has inside her head. Three new bags of grain from the southern provinces, good for light salads if you have time, you usually don’t — a hardy health loaf with the barley from the Earth imports sounds like it keeps for weeks if you skip the fat and sweet. Preserved kesset greens and Bolian crushed tomatoes, dried Wentilian sausage, Breen otek liver pate, the cheapest Romulan ale — the kind that warms you up really fast, like a fire’s possessed you. Makes great winter survival fare, and Bajoran elders bought them by the barrels before they came. “You don’t know how long power is gonna stay out. If you’ll ever get power again. If you don’t get used to eating old rotting food, you don’t eat period.”

Here’s where Jadzia’s face twists uncomfortably while she sees surprisingly enough, two more mapa bread loaves in much better condition than the last one. Just a little fuzz dancing on the moistened crust. Moistened from the leaking box of Andorian berry juice on the upper shelf. Which was crushed by the dried Dahkur roots in a sack. Maybe these loaves could be kept, Jadzia thinks, it wouldn’t be as bad to eat compared to the Dahkur roots. But she snaps out of it when she realizes she’s starting to get into Kira’s way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking that is deeply, deeply scarred, and is bandaged over and over again helplessly into a mostly functional humanoid.

“I think we should stop here,” Jadzia uneasily answers. She goes to close the cabinet but as an afterthought, extracts the berry juice from its slow death and throws it away like it could explode — delicately and anxiously. If Kira wants to eat moldy bread, let her eat one that isn’t an impending biohazard.

“But we still have new crates to store,” Kira gestures to the boxes and boxes she has lying about in her living room, which makes her comfy first officer’s quarters look less like the esteemed space of a Major and more like a hut that’s promptly evacuating itself of its family. “You look like you got MOST of the REALLY bad stuff out there — we can finish this up before bed time, I swear.”

Jadzia presses her lips. “But I’m tired,” Jadzia decides a little pout might get Kira to settle down. “Ben has me going on a scouting mission with Odo and Julian to a recently discovered Class M planet in the Gamma quadrant, I need to sleep!”

Kira looks like she’s about to interject, about to argue with Jadzia the importance of doing this, why they might need it if something happens to the station. Maybe they would get trapped in her quarters together because of a hull breach, or an explosion — an explosion from another awful hidden Cardassian program deep within the station’s computers! Then maybe the section they’re trapped in floats out into orbit, unable to be conveniently fetched, because the runabouts too, they were destroyed by the program! With no hopes to escape, how would she and Jadzia keep on? Could they expect rescue? Captain Sisko could be on a vacation to Earth while this happens and, oh, Prophets—

“Nerys?” Jadzia’s voice cuts through the chatter and suddenly the station isn’t debris in space. It’s still the same old dysfunctional station. “Kira?”

Kira comes out of heavy breathing and sweats and remembers much of this is an entirely irrational gesture. And gulps.

“I’m fine,” she exhales and then lets herself be embraced by Jadzia. She feels the apron and the mask against her neck and then Jadzia’s bare hands, gripping at her back, and breathlessly laughs a little. She only had time to rip off her gloves before striding over on those stupid long legs of hers. “I’m fine Jadzia really, okay, we’ll go to bed Jadzia, Jadzia... Let’s go to bed.”

Jadzia squeezes Kira a little longer before removing herself and pushing her face mask down to give her a hungry kiss. Starving. Kira thinks this is the only kind of hunger that should be allowed, because she can keep satisfying it and she’ll still want more. And there’s always more.

—

They go. They shower. They lay down next to each other. They have sex. They officially begin to rest. And the light from the small replicator near their bed flickers once. Jadzia sighs in relief knowing Kira is occupied — resting comfortably between her breasts, to notice that light short out like the beginnings of a Red Alert. The both of them are too deeply entangled with each other to be separated, Kira couldn’t jump out of bed in a panic even if she wanted to.

It’s funny that the anxiety never leaves the room. Jadzia knows Kira will keep doing this, even in her old age. That’s what happens when you’ve grown up in an occupation all your life. She’ll have to keep tying the face mask on, pulling the gloves over her calloused, but well taken care of hands, and preparing herself to walk into the spare closet Kira has designated as a disaster shelter. She’ll keep going between being completely empathetic to exasperated with the preparation and then the dismantling, the stockpiling and the night frights, the invasion drills—

“Jadzia, Jadzia...” Kira mumbles sleepily and Jadzia immediately presses her closer, holds her right leg down with her right. “I’m thirsty...”

“Are you sure you are,” Jadzia mumbles back, snuggling her and running her fingers through the soft curls of Kira’s hair with the hope that she’ll just drift back to sleep. “It’s too comfortable to leeaaaveeee...”

“I’m sure,” Kira answers. “Let me out, I’m gonna get... a cup of Andorian berry juice. It’s really good heated up a little with that cinnamon spice Sisko has, I have a couple in my...” When Kira stops talking, Jadzia doesn’t relax until she hears Kira’s soft snoring. And when Jadzia relaxes because she hears Kira’s soft snoring, the replicator decides to flicker once more again.

“I gotta have to call Miles about this...” Jadzia grumbles. She readjusts their positions until they’re holding onto each other like koalas — a marsupial, Julian has told her. All they do is hang up in a specific type of tree that provides them with all the food they could ever need. The tree is their entire livelihood. If you uproot enough of their trees, you basically evict them, starve them, and then you have a whole species’ blood on your hands, which is pretty awful, because they don’t do much else except merely live. Natural survivors given the measly criteria of a single tree is met.

Kira tells a story, a tale from the wormhole aliens, similar to the plight of an average koala. It’s about an isolated Bajoran community that survives through plagues and feats of great destruction in the desert, with nothing to sustain them but a handful of trees and a small watering hole.

The tablets, Kira noted, did not specify what these trees were, if they provided only food or food and shelter, how small the watering hole was, how big the community was, but the persevering message of the tale in the end was that with enough, Bajorans could live through any disaster, any problem. As skeptical as Jadzia is about the “Prophets”, she has to admit that the uncanny coincidences behind Bajoran prophecy are impressive.

They were definitely right about Kira, Jadzia thinks. A born survivor. A strong woman. A born lover, she muses even more when thinking of how they moved together not too long ago... Kira Nerys is a woman of great magnitude. She lives like each day is going to be her last, and maybe it will be. She is quick to sacrifice herself while maintaining a sense of extreme self preservation.

In any case, Jadzia decides she could speak. “Computer, time.” she asks quietly.

“2300 hours,” the computer answers, just as quietly.

Jadzia groans. “The mission is at 0500,” she bemoans.

“I can call and say you’ve got a cold,” Kira peeks out from under Jadzia’s chin and Jadzia doesn’t know if she should be surprised. She was always a light sleeper. “Is there a Trill specific illness I could say you have— the Trill chills, something like that...”

“Spotted fever,” Jadzia quips, sleepily. “When you have way more spots than you should...”

“Like a spotted targ!” Kira snickers under her breath and Jadzia can’t help but giggle back. “A rare disease where the spots turn into growths, and then out hatch tiny worms—”

“Nerys!” Jadzia scolds playfully while the laughter starts to ratchet up in volume. “Ben knows the symbiotes aren’t born like that!”

“Even Julian knows, but I bet you can convince him otherwise!”

“I know I can convince Worf!”

Kira and Jadzia dissolve into helpless titters under the sheets and it isn’t until Jadzia asks the computer what the time is again that they calm down and slow their breaths and begin to mindlessly stroke each other.

“Nerys,” Kira looks up to look straight into the deeply entrancing stare of her lover and best friend, her confidant. “I love you.”

Kira smiles widely. “I love you too Jadzia.”

They finally go to sleep.


End file.
